Empowerhouse, Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology.

Almost exactly two years ago, I went to visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. This year’s Solar Decathlon had the same goal — to design and build the best energy-efficient house powered by the sun. Like the houses in 2009, and the houses designed in the four previous competitions, the houses this year are most striking because of how different the designs are for each.

Some contributors invented new material to insulate the home more effectively (used in CHIP, designed by the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the California Institute of Technology), others were inspired by traditional architectural forms and materials (TRTL, designed by the University of Calgary), while others were designed to sit on the roofs of existing buildings (Team New York’s Solar Roofpod, City College 0f New York).

Solar Roofpod, City College of New York.

The entries span four continents and five countries, and each are based on ten criteria. The top five criteria are: architectural design, market appeal, engineering, communications and affordability. You can visit a photo gallery of the houses here.

Interestingly, there was only one home that was designed for an urban setting: Team New York’s Solar Roofpod. This house was creatively designed to be placed on a roof to better leverage the rooftop space in New York buildings, incorporating roof gardens, storm water capture mechanisms and sustainable air conditioning through a heat transfer process (rather than electricity). Team New York brought up the question of how practical many of the home designs are for urban locations, including the fact that the definition of affordability for the competition — $250,000 — was out of the reach of most New Yorkers and city residents. One other home, Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology’s Empowerhouse, also considered urban application: It will be used as a Habitat for Humanity house in D.C. after the competition.

You can visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. from September 23 to October 2, 2011.

With a teeming population of over 11 million, São Paulo is Brazil’s economic, cultural and administrative hub. As the financial capital of Brazil, and indeed Latin America, it is a booming global city with high growth and low unemployment rates. Yet UN-HABITAT reports that there is approximately one millionaire for every one hundred of the city’s poor and that São Paulo continues to have one of the highest income disparities in the world. Such disparities manifest themselves spatially, etched in the city, as depicted perhaps most famously in Teresa Caldeira’s "City of Walls."

In order to directly experience São Paulo’s housing inequities, IHP Cities visited one of its high-end gated communities and one of its makeshift squatter settlements (favelas) on the same day. The first is an exclusive residential and shopping complex named Cidade Jardim (Garden City), perhaps in an attempt to evoke Ebenezer Howard’s utopic vision. The latter is Vila Prudente, the oldest favela in São Paulo, settled in the 1950s.

Fortified entrance to Cidade Jardim residential towers.

Exploring the Cidade Jardim residential complex.

Once we got through the layers of security, including passport checks, we were met by architects employed by JHSF, the developers of Cidade Jardim. The development consists of nine residential towers with 322 apartments, the smallest being 240 square meters and the largest 2000. People who purchased their flats before construction paid $2,200 per square meter but those selling now can fetch a price of over $9,000 per square meter. The integration of the residences into the shopping mall – the most expensive in the city, with celebrity advertising campaigns from Sarah Jessica Parker and Heidi Klum – is one of the attractions for people living here. There is also a luxurious spa where membership costs $250 per month, half the rate charged to non-residents – who need to know a resident in order to become members. According to the architects we spoke to, security is one of the main motivations of the development: “People have everything here. It is important for them to be protected.”

A complex scale model of Tokyo is on view by appointment at Tokyo's Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills. The model was built in 2003 by 30 Mori employees over approximately 17 months. All streets and buildings were photographed at street level and from above via helicopter. They were then adjusted in Photoshop and glued to polystyrene models.

Touring the model is a fascinating introduction to Mori's vision for the city, which is planned for construction after the company consolidates enough subdivided residential plots. "Just a matter of patience," the guide assured us.

Mori's flagship concept of Vertical Garden Cities aims to increase the "efficiency of urban infrastructure, including rail transportation and road systems, while systematically integrating diverse urban functions, including work, residence/living, entertainment, education, and commercial/retail." This means putting all urban eggs in one "super high-rise" basket (offices at the top so that executives can feel powerful, residences below for proximity to green space). Greening will allow residents to enjoy "The touch of leaves. The fragrance of the grass. The crackle of fallen leaves underfoot. ... The singing of crickets in autumn."

According to the Vertical Garden Cities guide, residents of these all-in-one structures will still be able to explore the city via train lines that pass through basement stations and terminate at spaces of consumption, such as Disneyland and Kidzania (where parents pay to enter and their children "learn about the social system" by pretending to be nurses, dentists, runway models, window cleaners and countless other professions — sponsored by companies like P&G and Coca-Cola).

Living space for the employees who service Vertical Garden Cities isn't specified. They would probably live in the western half of Tokyo, past Shinjuku, which is of such little interest to Mori that the map ends abruptly at Shinjuku Station. There are no plans to include it in the future. "What is the name of that park at the edge of the map?" I ask. "I don't know, it's not important," answers our guide.

This post is part of a collection of Featured Places from around the world. If you'd like to share photos of a great place, just add them to the Flickr group or send them to info@thepolisblog.org and we will publish your feature. Video and sound recordings are also welcome.

In the September edition of 7STOPS magazine, Benjamin Korman took a look at the Newtown Creek Nature Walk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. What he found was an homage to industry, tucked between a sewage treatment plant and creek so polluted that signs warned against kayaking. What Korman evokes in his description is not one of nature — there's about as much nature here as in your average collection of potted plants — but of foul smells and poor scenery. This is where I stop agreeing with him: He considers this a drawback, and I think it's a feature.

In a city with more than 27,000 people for every square mile, room is scarce. The complaint that New York City is turning into a city for the rich is a valid one, but there is no denying that space has to be distributed in some fashion. Aside from some prominent exceptions, such as mandated low-income units, the preferred method of distribution is raising prices to reach equilibrium with demand. Usually, this price is in dollars or the price of sharing a park lawn with a thousand neighbors. With the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, the location and the smell are the price you pay.

Korman's right: The location is undesirable. Your choice of vistas is a construction site to the west, a highway to the north and the sewage treatment plant to the east and south. He's right about the smell, too, though anyone who has lived in a fishing community will come away wondering what the big deal is. But for these reasons, I have yet to see more than three people there at any time. Contrast this with the High Line or McCarren Park, where the only time you'll see just three people is at 3 a.m. or in the middle of the winter.

Am I going to take a date or a game of chess to the nature walk? No, though I should mention that I've witnessed the latter. Will I take refuge there when one of my four roommates has plugged in his amp, and I've had a long week of work? Of course, and the smell is a fair price to pay.

Dustin Coates is founder at 7STOPS, an online monthly magazine focusing on one topic a month from seven different perspectives. A Texan from childhood, he now calls Greenpoint, Brooklyn home.

Tomás Saraceno, an architect by training, creates large-scale installations that offer new ways of inhabiting the world. His latest installation — "Cloud Cities" — was inspired by the flexibility of bubbles and spider webs. Twenty balloon models are suspended in the exhibition space, their intricate networks of cables intersecting as visitors enter them and bounce on transparent floors.

"Cloud Cities" is presented by the National Museums in Berlin and will be on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof until Jan. 15, 2012.

Urbanization in China — explosive and seemingly boundless in potential — has in some cities reached a "natural" obstacle. A vast ring of post-industrial sites surrounds cities like Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Although the factories have moved further afield, the remaining land and groundwater are often seriously contaminated. As cities push outward these sites are a threat to human health and an impediment to urban growth. A comprehensive legal and technical framework for cleaning up these sites has yet to be developed, as it has in other post-industrial nations. Redevelopment practices are ad-hoc and dominated by international firms that undertake remediation as a matter of corporate, not social, responsibility.

But this may change by the end of the year, as the Ministry of Environmental Protection is expected to release a set of remediation guidelines. Modeled on practices in the North America (the Superfund Act) and the U.K. (Part IIa of the Environmental Protection Act), it will be a step in the right direction for mature and sustainable urban growth.

The real challenge, however, will be to develop a Chinese model for post-industrial site remediation and reintegration. After all, the political, legal and social context in China is unique. The potential for large-scale remediation projects is greater here than in the Superfund model, which is based on a slow and litigious process. China still has the capacity to think big and act fast. The Shanghai Expo site was perhaps a successful model for a quick and technically successful process. The Tianjin Eco-City project makes a point of remediating and building on contaminated land rather than the easily developed but crucial agricultural areas nearby.

In the North America and Europe, the post-industrial landscape inspired artists and designers in new directions and scales. Robert Smithson worked with the language of contamination (as did to some extent Agnes Denes and Christo and Jean-Claude). More recently, designers like Julie Bargmann (D.I.R.T. Studio) combined this language with technology to create beautiful and remediative landscapes. Today's "green" designs are bland and generic in comparison. A window is opening in China for another renaissance in land art in association with land remediation. Designers — both local and international — who have cashed in on China's development boom will hopefully take note.

Often embroiled in the rhetoric of global city discourse, the term “Creative City” (which involves making a city attractive to the “Creative Class”) is a label Tel Aviv aims to adopt. This label has gained increased notoriety in recent years, thanks to Richard Florida and Charles Landry upholding the regenerating powers of creativity. However, the “Creative City” and its proponents are often criticized for deploying the most recent neo-liberal iteration of capitalist accumulation through the fabrication of a model sponsoring urban policies linking creativity to economic action.

Tel Aviv has many examples of genuine creativity that are not immediately economically viable but are hidden catalysts to becoming a “Global City.” The cultural amenities that define a city are crucial to its status in the hierarchy of urban destinations, allowing cities to attract the most popular global tours, exhibitions and artists. But for a destination to succeed as a “Creative City,” cultural institutions need to interact with creative practices at the grassroots level. Museums and galleries will only succeed if the city’s intrinsic artistic values are embedded in the local community, ultimately serving as a foundation for creative practices.

In Tel Aviv, the Ha’chanut Gallery offers a small but interdisciplinary performance space in which actors interact with artists and musicians to put on a show that blends cultures and disciplines. Independent cultural offerings are crucial to the fabric of a city, since they provide the broad spectrum of cultural provisioning upon which economic competitiveness can be built.

Kav 16 is a vital cultural provision. Artists cannot always afford the gallery spaces in larger facilities in Tel Aviv or access the exhibition opportunities of citywide and national festivals. Kav 16 provides this venue by functioning as community gallery exhibiting contemporary art "outside the mainstream."

The Tzimer Music Rooms (below) is a small utilitarian and inspiring exhibition/performance space where budding experimental musicians can develop their sound in collaboration with visual artists as working audience.

Tzimer Music Rooms

The Old Bus Station in Tel Aviv is a fascinating space and must be considered in any discussion about alternative cultural provisioning. Within the rhetoric of the “Creative City,” human creativity is often heralded as the panacea for economic stagnation, but at the site of a decaying bus station, a type of creativity far removed from traditional models flourishes.

One of the major issues in Moscow’s public space is a lack of communication. Citizens can’t discuss what they really want in the city — there’s no platform for discussion. The promo video of the game 'Crowdsourced Moscow 2012' is based on the results of Strelka-graduate Andrei Goncharov’s research — a megasimulator in which the city is controlled by a balance of interests of different groups: residents, developers, architects, bureaucrats, businessmen, environmentalists. Solutions, for example on the construction of parking at Pushkin Square, or the demolition of the Peter I statue on Bolotny Island, are determined together.

Similar ideas have captured my interest over the past three years. This began during a walk through Cascadilla Park (above), a beautiful residential street that winds down a hill beside an urban gorge. It was built in the early 20th century based on Progressive Era ideas of civic engagement for improving cities beset by the effects of industrialization. I was inspired to find ways of supporting this kind of civic engagement today. During my search, Rob Holmes of Mammoth recommended a blog post by Brian Davis of Faslanyc.

Brian was working as a landscape architect and reading about Landscape Urbanism and Networked Ecologies, bodies of theory that encourage designers to consider the human and nonhuman networks through which urban ecosystems change, in order to optimize them for ecological well-being. Brian found these ideas compelling but often abstract, massive and top-down. He thought of a "lo-fi" approach based on similar ecological interventions at smaller scales, with grassroots origins and distributed funding via websites like PayPal.

I had been reading Urban Political Ecology and Right to the City literature, which proposes solutions to social and environmental problems based on political mobilization. It is also compelling and often abstract. I was interested in generating momentum through small-scale, experimental, technology-enabled projects that could eventually lead to larger initiatives.

"Landscape ecology emphasizes broad spatial scales and the ecological effects of the spatial patterning of ecosystems. Specifically, it considers a) the development and dynamics of spatial heterogeneity, b) the interactions and exchanges across heterogeneous landscapes, c) the influences of spatial heterogeneity on biotic and abiotic processes, and d) the management of spatial heterogeneity. ... Ecologists, land managers, and planners have traditionally ignored interactions between the different elements in a landscape — the elements are usually treated as different systems."

One of my first impressions of Dutch sociologist Jan Willem Duyvendak was when he bravely announced to a room full of critical urban social scientists that he loved Starbucks. In the bourgeois circles of academic urbanism, this is perhaps not as shocking as Peter Sigrist's ode to McDonalds, for his comment seemed to draw as many smirks and self-conscious nods as winces. Perhaps it was because the audience understood the basic argument behind his point — he feels at home in Starbucks, in part because it is generic. Like Sigrist, Duyvendak recognizes that, in contemporary society, global corporations are often able to create zones of comfort and security — "hominess" of a sort — which the critical urbanists in us would prefer to think is only possible in the hyper-local and the unique.

The Starbucks argument is a small piece of Duyvendak's larger struggles with the interlocking questions of home, belonging and nostalgia, the subject of his recently released book The Politics of Home. Rooted in some of the same questions as the upcoming Cambridge conference on nationalism and the city, Duyvendak is prompted to explore the question of home by the rising ethno-nationalism he is witnessing throughout western Europe. This wave constantly refers to the nation as a home under attack by "foreigners" and outsiders.

As a longtime student of the United States, he noticed two other "crises" in American spaces in which the question of home is also front and center: the traditional household, where both the gender revolution and ongoing economic pressures have altered the line between work and home in ways many find uncomfortable and unsettling, and gay neighborhoods like San Francisco's Castro district, where men and women long unable to make homes in their birth communities came to establish "home" at the neighborhood scale.

Along with Duyvendak's sparse and wonderfully unpretentious writing, the book's strength is this examination of one of the most basic and seemingly simple of human concepts — what makes us feel at home — along the scales of the household, neighborhood and nation. Though rooted in years of research, the book is more conceptual than overly empirical, and Duyvendak is unafraid to think through the basic spaces and places where we feel at home and how this is altered at different scales. He conceptualizes home as having three components — familiarity, home as haven (secure, safe) and home as heaven (place for self-expression, free identity) — components that mesh unevenly and sometimes problematically, producing complex places that can be both freeing and exclusive at the same time.

In his short section on the Castro, Duyvendak smartly highlights that the attempt by some Castro residents to push the community beyond a familiar haven for gays and lesbians into a heaven for explicitly gay self-expression worked to exclude in a place initially founded for the excluded. Similar forces are at work in the Netherlands, where the mostly Muslim "outsiders" are excluded from the Dutch "home" in part because of allegations that they are not inclusive — of gays, women and supposedly Dutch progressive values.

Ultimately, Duyvendak's heart is with the difficult question of home and nationalism in the Netherlands and with the larger questions of exclusion, belonging and nostalgia in sociology. Despite his vast credentials as an urbanist, the urban question is at times lost or underdeveloped in the text. I would be curious to hear how he reformulates his questions about heaven and haven with cities — as opposed to neighborhoods or nations — front and center. As I discussed last month, I feel at home in Amsterdam, despite the fact that I am a foreigner, but that may have to do with the fact that I supposedly share the "progressive values" being distorted in the name of exclusion. It could also be that, like many in the footloose, mobile and often privileged class that forms part of his understanding of how different people relate to questions of space, place and home, I am just very good at making myself at home wherever I am, including a Starbucks in a global city.

The high volume of vacant and derelict buildings woven into the urban fabric of Rome has provided an opportunity for those unable or unwilling to pay formal market rents to proactively reclaim slices of the city through a strategy of occupation and resistance. The marginal socio-political status of low-income Italians, immigrants and Roma population has evolved, through the forced occupation of abandoned sites and structures, into a spatial cohesion and network within the city. While some occupied buildings lie on the periphery of Rome and make their marginal status clear through location, security and protection measures to isolate and decrease visibility (Metropoliz), others are very central and integrated with neighboring areas and formal housing (Porto fluviale).

Part of a disused salami factory on the Metropoliz occupation site, reclaimed by squatters.

One of several self-organized internally segregated areas within Metropoliz — this area is home to Peruvian immigrants.

As part of an innovative workshop exploring this urbanism of resistance, the Development Planning Unit (DPU) of the Bartlett in the U.K. recently activated its inaugural summerLab, structured as a six-day immersion into contested sites in Rome. The primary case study, grounded in the Metropoliz occupation, dealt with two adjacent sites, each containing derelict factory buildings. In the past two years, both sites have been occupied by squatters, immigrants and a Roma population in an attempt to both secure a home within the peripheral urban limits and actively resist market and political pressures forcing them into marginalization.

According to U.N. water statistics, conventional flush toilets in middle-class households account for approximately 30 percent of global water use. The average daily water use per person among middle-class populations is about 200 liters, although in some countries the volume is larger. (In the U.S., for example, it is 380 liters per person.) Thus, on average, each middle-class person uses 60 liters of fresh water per day to flush their urine and feces down the drain. Considering that there are almost 7 billion people on earth (expected to reach 9 billion by 2050) and that only three percent of the world's water is fresh, is it reasonable to use this water to flush toilets?

The s-trap watercloset facility, known as the flush toilet, appeared in Europe and North America in the late 19th century, when the earth's human population was approximately 1.8 billion and water was considered an infinite resource. Today, with almost four times as many people on earth and the majority of water sources either polluted or over-exploited, we are still using the same inefficient device. Moreover, it is being adopted throughout the developing word, accelerating the extraction and pollution of fresh water sources.

The solution to this unsustainable situation has already been invented. The approach is generally known as ecological sanitation (eco-san), which aims at making efficient use of the water and nutrient cycle in each household/neighborhood — a form of permaculture. This is very difficult to manage with flush toilets. A more appropriate device is the dry toilet. Ecological sanitation combines this technology with effective policy, education and funding mechanisms to effectively minimize the wasteful consumption of fresh water water supplies.

Credits: Photo of a sewer dumping waste water into a river from Preparedness Pro. Illustration of early flush toilet design by J. G. Jennings (1877). Dry toilet graphic from Gold Mine.

I'm involved with a project at the University of Cambridge that takes as its focus the intersect between nationalism and the city. As the deadline for a paper proposals nears, my co-organizer Chris Moffat and I thought we would offer a brief introduction to the theme for Polis readers:

As urbanists, we regularly claim that "the city" breathes life into those within it. Yet this relationship is twofold: ‘the city’ would be nothing without the breath and imagination of its own people.

An interesting problem emerges here: How are we to understand the role of space and place in the history of ideas? Can we conceive of an intellectual history written spatially? Ideas move, that is certain. They can ricochet off certain surfaces and be absorbed by others, transformed by integration or emboldened by rejection. But can certain ideas have specific relationships with certain types of spatial environments?

An upcoming conference at the University of Cambridge hopes to find an entry point to these questions by narrowing the parameters, navigating towards the city. What, it asks, is the role of urban space in the history of nationalism as an idea? How does the city relate to the constitution of national identity as a discourse?

The apparently ambivalent relationship between nationalism and the city offers an opportunity to think about the ways space can affect the origins, dissemination, perpetuation and undermining of ideas. Homogenizing nationalist narratives seem to leave little room for the chaotic reality of the city, but the two share intersecting imaginaries and have inspired multi-layered identities. It was through cities that early ideas of the nation were traded, and it is in cities that national identities have been pushed to their breaking points. The urban has helped to shape the national, and this relationship also works in reverse: cities can be sites for national consolidation and commemoration, but also facilitate the emergence of spaces of alterity and zones of conflict.

The February 2012 conference, hosted in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), is designed to "re-center" the urban in theories of nations and nationalism and is currently inviting paper proposals from across the spectrum of academic, professional and informal interests. Over the next few months, Polis will follow the conference's development through a series of posts; readers are encouraged to participate in this conversation on the role of cities in nationalism's pasts, presents and futures.

The fast approaching deadline for paper proposals is Oct. 1, 2011. Details on submission can be found on the conference website.

In her conversational preamble at a recent show at the Yoshi's jazz club in San Francisco, Brazilian songstress Luisa Maita introduced the song "Alento" (which roughly translates as "encouragement"or "courage") as an homage to the city of São Paulo. Paraphrasing Maita: "Sao Paulo is difficult — it's hard, it's energetic, it's ... nice. But it is difficult. Traffic is very bad: three hours to get to work, then three hours to go home. You must have a lot of desire to get things done."

Urban congestion was articulated as a deterrent to the spirit of endeavor. Surely for those of us who have been mired in soul-sucking traffic for hours, this observation makes good sense, what more in a city of more than 7 million vehicles.

Thankfully, city dwellers are a resilient lot. Stephen Johnson in his book, "Where Good Ideas Come From," pulls from the work of theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, whose research investigates whether urban life slows down as cities grow in size, just as metabolism slows down when living organisms scale up in size. While the slowdown is apparent in energy and transportation growth in city living, to his delight (and ours), human ingenuity accelerates in the congested urban environment:

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative ... that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.

The will to endeavor thrives among creative groups in hyper-interconnected, fluidly networked dense cities.

And what of small but ambitious city states such as Singapore and Dubai? Against the backdrop of West's findings, it isn't surprising that their governments strive to create special economic zones and incubator environments to draw in the creative class, researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses. In the absence of organic density, these small city states put in place incentives to generate what a large, dense urban setting would naturally engender. Some may argue that this avoids the side effects of crime, congestion and chaos, while others point to progress tainted by a sense of sterility and artifice.

In her liner notes, Maita mentions that "Alento" is sung from the point of view of a motorcycle delivery boy zipping through the city. With its driving maculelê rhythm, it is ultimately a celebration of the indomitable industrious energy and gumption for urban life embodied by cities like São Paulo:

Do you know of a secret sacred building in your neighborhood? Do you know of a shop that has become a mosque or an apartment that has become an Iglesia Evangelica? Is there a prayer space on your block?

One of my favorite exhibition spaces that often features shows related to urbanism is Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. On view at the moment is "Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings" by Italian artist and architect Matilde Cassani (b. 1980). Cassani is a Ph.D. candidate who currently teaches at the Politecnico di Milano and is developing a project on "holy urbanism" at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA).

Iglèsia Pentecostal, Mercy Avenue, New York.

Cassani’s exhibit at Storefront explores the secret sacred territory throughout New York. The photographs unveil the many ways in which religion manifests itself in non-traditional spaces in the contemporary city.

As part of the exhibition, Storefront and Cassani are also developing a New York archive of sacred spaces in profane buildings and are calling for submissions from the public. These can be memories of a visit, a sketch of a known space, a photograph of a street sign or a location on a map. The aim is to construct a comprehensive guide to the sacred unknown of New York.

The exhibition will transform Storefront's facade into a golden wall framing three spaces for reflection: 1) a reading room connected to the archive; 2) a presentation of four mobile, foldable structures designed by the curator based on her research into objects associated with rituals performed in temples and unofficial prayer rooms; 3) a presentation of a collection of symbolic objects donated by different religious communities in New York.

The age of majestic churches, glimmering synagogues and grandiose mosques may be gone, their remnants sometimes turned into museums, theaters or shopping malls. But the need for quiet spaces for contemplation in the bustling city seems to remain. These are no longer visible architectural manifestations but are retrofitted, hidden away, sometimes only identifiable by their users.

Nagarjuna Buddist Temple, Carrer Rossellò pral 2A, Barcelona.

Does this mean that religion in the city has left the political and public sphere and turned into a private question? Probably not. Cassani’s image of the mosque in the community center at 51 Park Place reminds me of the political turbulence I experienced last year living in New York, sparked by the fact that the mosque was to be located near the the World Trade Center site. Although it was hidden behind a profane facade, it provoked public debate. But it’s there today — a symbol of the tolerance large cities often create.

PARK 51 mosque (ex. Cordoba House), 51 Park Place, New York.

The exhibition will run from Sept. 14 to Nov. 5 at Storefront for Art and Architecture. A series of closing talks, lectures and debates will take place on Nov. 5 from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

"I want to argue that one of the most urgent problems in planning and architectural theory today is the need to develop a different social imagination — one that is not modernist but that nevertheless reinvents modernism's activist commitments to the invention of society and to the construction of the state. I suggest that the sources of this new imaginary lie not in any specifically architectural or planning production of the city but rather in the development of theory in both fields as an investigation into what I call the spaces of insurgent citizenship....By insurgent, I mean to emphasize the opposition of these spaces of citizenship to the modernist spaces that physically dominate so many cities today. I also use it to emphasize an opposition to the modernist political project that absorbs citizenship into a plan of state building and that, in the process, generates a certain concept and practice of planning itself. ... The spaces of an insurgent citizenship constitute new metropolitan forms of the social not yet liquidated by or absorbed into the old. As such, they embody possible alternative futures."

James Holston, from "Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship," in Cities and Citizenship, 1999.

This is part of a collection of quotes related to cities. They don't necessarily reflect our views, just topics of interest. We welcome you to add others.

When the streets of North London burst into flames on Aug. 6, few could agree on what prompted the display of violence, looting and destruction. Even fewer could have imagined that an initially peaceful protest in Tottenham would unravel into a national urban crisis. Questions have been posed across the political spectrum, and perspectives have clashed significantly. One month on, the victims are still searching for answers.

As burning and looting rocked England’s cities, the Progress Film Company began compiling a collection of local perspectives, asking residents about the causes of the riots. The resulting film is below.